The Foundation
We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.
The Team
The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports global efforts to eradicate infectious diseases and achieve permanent improvements in health. We develop, use, and share computational modeling tools, and promote quantitative decision-making. The IDM team comprises both research scientists and software engineers. IDM has a bold and important vision, and you will play a key role in realizing that vision through the impact you have as a technical leader, as a collaborator, and as a thought partner.
IDM’s software engineering teams are a crucial part of this work, supporting researchers with specialist software development skills and scientific insight. IDM is committed to sharing its work as a public good benefiting the global community of scientists and health-care workers, especially in low-income and low-resource parts of the world.
Application Deadline: Friday, November 1, 2024
Your Role
We are looking for an expert software engineering leader to manage a team of research software engineers working with IDM’s Rapid Reuse Models group. The group creates innovative new approaches to disease modeling. It is responsible for the Starsim framework for agent-based modeling tools.
The Starsim framework includes modules supporting modeling applications that include sexually transmitted diseases, enterics, respiratory pathogens, and maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health. Starsim applications inform product, data, and policy decisions, making tangible impact on global public health.
This is a leadership role reporting to the IDM Deputy Director for Software, contributing directly to IDM's impact. The role calls for capable management of dedicated software engineers; high-quality partnership with peers in research management to make difficult trade-offs and priority decisions; and the ability to conceive, plan, and drive strategic vision in a research setting.
Success depends on excellent communication skills; on working transparently and flexibly with research managers; and on building deep understanding of the research and technology spaces IDM researchers work in.
You will contribute to decisions about software design and distribution to increase the impact of our modeling software as a global public good. This will involve sophisticated trade-offs over factors that influence the success of shared code. These could include the way code is written, its ease-of-use, run-time requirements, documentation content, and community engagement.
You will lead your team to be agile and adaptable, able to swarm to address short-term challenges, but also able to deliver bigger projects in an iterative and adaptive way.
What You’ll Do
Team management and leadership. Be responsible for goal setting and performance management; career direction, coaching, and mentoring; and task management.
Represent IDM strategy and direction in a way that supports your team's ability to work with autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Partner with research managers to understand research goals and translate them into technical requirements and quality assurance approaches for software development.
Provide technical leadership to your team by setting technical direction, supplying technical insight and experience, ensuring quality, and finding opportunities for improvement.
Align software development practices with IDM's mission and values, including our dedication to open-source software and public goods.
Collaborate with other software engineering managers to share knowledge and ideas, and to promote common practices and technologies.
Advocate for flexible and effective software engineering practices that accelerate and facilitate our extraordinary research work.
Collaborate with external modeling groups to understand needs, capabilities, and enablers of code reuse.
Drive for continuous improvement of our codebases, including major re-writes, re-designs, and re-factoring when appropriate.
Your Experience
We’re looking for people with training and experiences that combine science and software engineering. The science background could be a degree or degrees, or could be experience somewhere that does computational science. The software engineering background could also be some combination of education, training, or experience. Ideally your background would be in a health-related area.
Extensive track record as a software engineering manager.
Experience leading software engineering projects for a wide range of user types.
Exceptionally proficient with Python. Hands-on proficiency with the other programming languages we use at IDM (R, C/C++).
Eagerness to learn and engage with new challenges, including demonstrated ability to become proficient with new programming packages, tools and technologies quickly.
Understanding of and experience with common software development lifecycle practices and associated tools and services (GitHub, Azure DevOps, etc.).
Knowledge of SDLC (CI/CD, unit/component/integration/system testing, release management, etc.) practices to meet changing business needs.
Experience crafting, delivering, and supporting software in open-source models, particularly for use in low-resource settings.
*Must be able to legally work in the country where this position is located without visa sponsorship.
Hiring Requirements
As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.
Candidate Accommodations
If you require assistance due to a disability in the application or recruitment process, please submit a request here.
Inclusion Statement
We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.
All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.
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